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Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook's Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg DIGITAL AUDIO
Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook's Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg DIGITAL AUDIO
Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook's Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg DIGITAL AUDIO
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Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook's Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg DIGITAL AUDIO

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Wall Street Journal Bestseller

Make Your Mark in the World with the Five Success Principles of the World-Changing Social Media Site

If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world.
Facebook accounts for one of every seven minutes spent online.
More than one billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook.

There’s no doubt about it. Mark Zuckerberg’s creation has changed the world. Literally. Facebook has singlehandedly revolutionized the way more than one-seventh of the world’s population communicates, engages, and consumes information.

If you run a business or plan to start one, you’re probably asking yourself the same question organizational leaders worldwide are asking: What did Mark Zuckerberg do right?

At long last, the answer is here. Think Like Zuck examines the five principles behind Facebook’s meteoric rise, presented in actionable lessons anyone can apply—in any organization, in any industry. Written by social business trailblazer Ekaterina Walter, this groundbreaking book reveals the five “P”s of Facebook’s success:

PASSION—Keep your energy and commitment fully charged at all times by pursuing something you believe in
PURPOSE—Don’t just create a great product; drive a meaningful movement
PEOPLE—Build powerful teams that can execute your vision
PRODUCT—Create a product that is innovative, that breaks all the rules, that changes everything
PARTNERSHIPS—Build powerful partnerships with people who fuel imagination and energize execution

Packed with examples of Facebook’s success principles in action—as well as those of Zappos, TOMS, Threadless, Dyson, and other companies—Think Like Zuck gives you the inspiration, knowledge, and insight to make your own mark in the world, to build a business that makes a difference, and to lead your organization to long-term profitability and growth.

Think Like Zuck is a fascinating look at how entrepreneurial vision drives success. If you want more out of work than just a job, if you have the burning desire to build something of lasting value, then this is your guide.”
—DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR

“Whether you’re a seasoned business executive or the next Mark Zuckerberg in your dorm room right now, this book is a must-read! Two likeable thumbs up!”
—DAVE KERPEN, New York Times bestselling author of Likeable Social Media and Likeable Business

“True success lies at the place where passion and purpose collide—this book will help you uncover yours.”
—JOHN JANTSCH, bestselling author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Commitment Engine

Think Like Zuck is a must-read for any innovator, social entrepreneur, or business owner looking to capitalize on the success of Facebook to propel and realize their own vision.”
—SIMON MAINWARING, New York Times bestselling author of We First

“This book takes you on the ride of a lifetime and shows you how YOU can be successful! The question is: What does it take? Ekaterina gives us the answers!”
—JEFFREY HAYZLETT, bestselling author of Running the Gauntlet and global business celebrity

“In Think Like Zuck, you will find important principles to infuse meaning into your business strategies and inspire change. Don’t just read this book; use it.”
—SHAWN ACHOR, author of the international bestseller The Happiness Advantage

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 12, 2013
ISBN9780071809504
Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook's Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg DIGITAL AUDIO

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    Think Like Zuck - Ekaterina Walter

    Praise for Think Like Zuck

    Ekaterina writes about innovation not only from the heart but also with the wisdom that comes from having led Intel through a social media transformation. Read this book—and buy it for the budding innovators in your company to inspire their passion and purpose.

    —Charlene Li, author of bestsellers Open Leadership and Groundswell and founder of Altimeter Group

    "Think Like Zuck provides a fresh perspective on entrepreneurship, drawing inspiration from some of the most innovative companies of our time."

    —Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Market, Sell, and Innovate

    "Think Like Zuck is a fascinating look at how entrepreneurial vision drives success. If you want more out of work than just a job, if you have the burning desire to build something of lasting value, then this is your guide. It’s for harnessing an entrepreneurial spirit no matter where you are—on your own, inside a big company, or as part of a nonprofit, church, or any other organization."

    —David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR

    "Ekaterina Walter does far more than reveal the story of Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. She reveals the emotional, intellectual, and proactive blueprint that determines which entrepreneurs fail, which succeed, and the few that do so spectacularly. Think Like Zuck is a must read for any innovator, social entrepreneur, or business owner looking to capitalize on the success of Facebook to propel and realize their own vision."

    —Simon Mainwaring, New York Times bestselling author of We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World

    "Think Like Zuck’s thoughtful rendering of the Facebook phenomenon provides keen insight into the one thing that the most successful companies on the web share: an ability to create instant and vital connections among individuals around the world. In its rapid spread to give us all both a global soapbox and a virtual fence to chat and share pictures over, Facebook represents a fundamental shift in the way we live: the Internet is now the primary touch point for the relationships people form. Businesses with an eye on profit must read this book and come to terms with the undeniable reality of Mark Zuckerberg’s vision."

    —Keith Ferrazzi, founder and chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight and New York Times bestselling author of Who’s Got Your Back and Never Eat Alone

    Copyright © 2013 by Ekaterina Walter. All rights reserved. Printed in China. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

    ISBN: 978-0-07-180950-4

    MHID:       0-07-180950-3

    The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: ISBN: 978-0-07-180949-8, MHID: 0-07-180949-X.

    All trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than put a trademark symbol after every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use names in an editorial fashion only, and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. Where such designations appear in this book, they have been printed with initial caps.

    McGraw-Hill eBooks are available at special quantity discounts to use as premiums and sales promotions, or for use in corporate training programs. To contact a representative please e-mail us at bulksales@mcgraw-hill.com.

    TERMS OF USE

    This is a copyrighted work and The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (McGraw-Hill) and its licensors reserve all rights in and to the work. Use of this work is subject to these terms. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976 and the right to store and retrieve one copy of the work, you may not decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer, reproduce, modify, create derivative works based upon, transmit, distribute, disseminate, sell, publish or sublicense the work or any part of it without McGraw-Hill’s prior consent. You may use the work for your own noncommercial and personal use; any other use of the work is strictly prohibited. Your right to use the work may be terminated if you fail to comply with these terms.

    THE WORK IS PROVIDED AS IS. McGRAW-HILL AND ITS LICENSORS MAKE NO GUARANTEES OR WARRANTIES AS TO THE ACCURACY, ADEQUACY OR COMPLETENESS OF OR RESULTS TO BE OBTAINED FROM USING THE WORK, INCLUDING ANY INFORMATION THAT CAN BE ACCESSED THROUGH THE WORK VIA HYPERLINK OR OTHERWISE, AND EXPRESSLY DISCLAIM ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. McGraw-Hill and its licensors do not warrant or guarantee that the functions contained in the work will meet your requirements or that its operation will be uninterrupted or error free. Neither McGraw-Hill nor its licensors shall be liable to you or anyone else for any inaccuracy, error or omission, regardless of cause, in the work or for any damages resulting there from. McGraw-Hill has no responsibility for the content of any information accessed through the work. Under no circumstances shall McGraw-Hill and/or its licensors be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, punitive, consequential or similar damages that result from the use of or inability to use the work, even if any of them has been advised of the possibility of such damages. This limitation of liability shall apply to any claim or cause whatsoever whether such claim or cause arises in contract, tort or otherwise.

    To all the dreamers: it is because you refuse to recognize the

    impossible that breathtaking innovation happens.

    To my father, Oleg. Your self-sacrifice and guidance

    have helped shape my future.

    CONTENTS

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    INTRODUCTION

    CONNECTING THE WORLD

    CHAPTER 1

    PASSION

    CHAPTER 2

    PURPOSE

    CHAPTER 3

    PEOPLE

    CHAPTER 4

    PRODUCT

    CHAPTER 5

    PARTNERSHIPS

    QUI AUDET ADIPISCITUR: WHO DARES, WINS

    NOTES

    INDEX

    Acknowledgments

    First and foremost, I would like to thank you, the reader, for picking up this book. I do hope you will find everything you are looking for inside. Your thoughts are welcome at www.ekaterinawalter.com.

    My deepest gratitude to Dave Kerpen and Stephanie Frerich for propelling me to make my dream of writing a book a reality. I am blessed to call you both friends.

    My appreciation to Facebook’s founders and its leadership for building a company worth writing about.

    Thanks to Ricky Van Veen, Jake Nickell, Aric Wood, David Armano, Scott Monty, Leslie Bradshaw, Jane Price, Nancy Bhagat, and Michelle Kaiser for your contributions to this project. It was a privilege to work with you. Special acknowledgments to Ellen McGirt and David Kirkpatrick for their wisdom and historic accounts of Facebook’s growth. Big thanks to the XPLANE team for taking my scattered thoughts and putting them into appealing visuals. It has been a gratifying experience to work with the amazing team at McGraw-Hill: Stephanie Frerich, Pamela Peterson, Laura Yieh, and Mary Glenn.

    I am thankful to all my friends who encouraged and supported me throughout the years and especially in the launch of this book. You are a gift!

    Although my family is last in these acknowledgments, they come first in my life. My success and personal growth wouldn’t be possible if not for their love and support. Eternal gratitude goes to: my husband, Brian, for being the best friend and partner anyone could wish for; my father, Oleg, for his courage, for showing me what’s possible, and for being the sounding board for the ideas and concepts in this book; my mother, Valentina, for her complete and undying faith in me; my sister, Natalia, for always being there for me; my grandparents, Taya and Vladimir, for their wisdom and strength; my in-laws, Lauri and Ray, for accepting me and loving me like their own; and my aunt, Ludmila, for her unconditional love. And a big warm hug goes to my little daughter, Taya, who teaches me how to be a kid again every single day.

    INTRODUCTION

    CONNECTING THE WORLD

    This morning, there are more than one billion people

    using Facebook actively each month. If you’re reading this:

    thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of

    serving you. Helping a billion people connect is amazing,

    humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in

    my life. I am committed to working every day to make

    Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we

    will be able to connect the rest of the world too.

    —Mark Zuckerberg in his Facebook status update on October 4, 2012¹

    It was a priceless gift. A gift of life. And it wasn’t Santa Claus who brought it right before Christmas 2010. It was Facebook.

    Donette Warren was desperate. Her ten-year-old daughter, Vivica, badly needed a kidney transplant. She had been on dialysis for three years, 12 hours a night. It was very hard to watch and harder for the little girl’s body to endure. Donette, a mother of five from Minnesota, took to Facebook to help spread the word and get her child badly needed help. She posted on Facebook again and again, pleading with her friends to share and repost on their walls. She was looking for a miracle.

    And she got it. Cathy Olsen, a total stranger, saw the post on her friend’s Facebook page. She had three kids of her own, and her heart went out to the little girl. That night, she showed the post to her family and told them she wanted to help. They approved. Cathy had never been through surgery, but she didn’t hesitate. Since family members are not automatically considered matches, Cathy knew she would probably never be able to contribute a kidney to one of her own children. Cathy was tested and determined a match for Vivica. So she went ahead and gave up her kidney at the University of Minnesota on November 17. I couldn’t sit around and watch a girl die that I knew I was a match for, she said. I hope she’s having the best Christmas ever!

    Vivica is all smiles; she is practically pain-free. Freedom, she says. [Cathy] is my angel.

    Her mom agrees: How many people have one of those?²

    This is a true storybook holiday miracle. And it happened because of the connections that Facebook facilitates among people of different ages, genders, backgrounds, and locations.

    There have been many touching stories like Vivica’s ever since Facebook launched on February 4, 2004. There are also stories about triumphs of love, as in the case of Paul Eaton and Dawn Pitman. In their twenties, the couple enjoyed an 18-month romance before going their separate ways. They continued to think about each other through the years until, 27 years later, Paul decided to join Facebook. Paul remembers: I had only been on Facebook for a day. I just typed Dawn’s name in and hoped for the best.

    Dawn’s niece, Rachel, had put up their holiday pictures on Facebook, which Dawn didn’t approve of: The irony was that I told her to take them off because I felt it was an invasion of privacy, and she said she would get around to it when she had time. That’s when Paul got in touch.

    The couple met up on New Year’s Eve 2008, and they were quite pleased to discover they hadn’t changed much. They both liked the same things, drove the same cars, and remembered each other fondly. The rekindled connection was quite instant. I knew then he was the one for me, said Dawn.³

    Then there’s the story of the man and woman with the same name who got married after meeting through Facebook. A young man from Texas, Kelly Hildebrandt, and a young woman from Florida, also named Kelly Hildebrandt, thought it was kind of amusing that they had the same first and last names and started a casual conversation on the topic. Eight months later—thanks to love at Facebook sight—Kelly proposed to Kelly, and the rest is history.

    Then there are the stories of reunited families, such as Don Gibson finding his son after 21 years. Don was a U.S. airman when he met Chrissie in the United Kingdom. They married in 1989 and had a son, Craig. Don was forced to move back to the United States to continue his Air Force service. Chrissie stayed behind, as she had two other sons from her previous marriage. They tried to stay in touch, but after a while, they lost contact with each other. For years, father and son looked for one another until one day Don logged onto Facebook and found Craig’s half-brother and, through him, Craig. The two reunited on Skype before Father’s Day 2012. The romance between Don and Chrissie rekindled. We can be a family again, said Don. I thank my lucky stars for modern technology, because without that, we wouldn’t be here.

    Family reunification pages started to appear on Facebook after natural disasters like earthquakes and tornados and other deadly events like shootings to help facilitate connections between survivors and provide support.

    And then there are stories of saved businesses. These days, Bistro 17, a small French-themed restaurant on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, is always buzzing with customers. Besides boasting mouthwatering Brie, the restaurant is dog-friendly, with dog bowls and treats on hand (and yes, they even have a puppy menu). But the place wasn’t always brimming with excitement. At one point, Bistro 17 was on the brink of shutting down. Anna Buckingham, the owner, tends to make friends with her customers. A partnership with one regular patron—who ran a Hilton Head Island Facebook page with over 65,000 fans—saved the business. They teamed up and created a great list of promotional ideas to help spread the word about Bistro 17 and rally the community around worthwhile causes.

    There are also stories of:

    • Ben Saylor, a 17-year-old boy who turned to the social networking site to organize a community effort to rebuild the Pioneer Playhouse, the oldest outdoor theater in Kentucky, after it was damaged in a flood.

    • Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who, during his time in office, went jogging with a hundred of his Facebook fans.

    • Holly Rose, whose friend’s Facebook status update urging women to check for breast cancer allowed Holly to be diagnosed in time to treat the disease.

    • Men and women around the world who have used Facebook to create powerful movements for causes such as freedom from oppression, freedom of speech, human rights, and animal rights.

    Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, says in one of his blog posts: Our mission is to help make the world more open and connected. Stories like these are examples of that mission and are both humbling and inspiring.

    Indeed! Such stories reflect a fundamental societal shift in which technologies are empowering us (and in some instances even saving our lives). We live in the era of digital revolution. Everyone can now have a voice; an individual can now be an authority. And social networks have the ability to give us true power of identity, to make our voices stronger, and, most important, to provide a platform for our voices to be heard. And Facebook is the biggest platform of them all.

    In eight years of existence, Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we interact online. It is the world’s largest enabler of human communication. We cannot imagine our lives without Facebook—it created a sweet addiction of 24/7 connection and information flow that we apparently all craved. We check Facebook before we go to bed and first thing in the morning when we wake up. It allows us to show the world our own unique identities, our own brands. It allows us to tell our stories, stories that can be heard at scale. It allows us to build global communities and rally around causes we are passionate about, enabling energized citizens to turn themselves into activists. Our News Feeds have become our personalized digital newspapers. And instead of picking up a phone, we log into Facebook to see what our friends are up to, check out pictures they recently posted, look at product recommendations (or complaints) they shared, or see what music they are currently listening to.

    Paul Adams, the global brand experience manager at Facebook, describes this seismic shift the best: [The web is] moving away from being built around content and is being rebuilt around people.

    Facebook was founded by 19-year-old Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (or Zuck, as he is known to every one of his acquaintances) on February 4, 2004. At the time, Zuck was a student at Harvard University, majoring in computer science and sociology. He first started the network with the purpose of connecting Harvard students. When non-Harvard students expressed interest, he expanded Facebook to more schools and, later, to the rest of the world. When users showed enormous interest and the network started to grow, Zuck dropped out of college and moved to Palo Alto, California, to solely focus on the endeavor. Facebook’s success made him a billionaire at 23.

    Here is the company’s history at a glance and some notable milestones:

    • In 2004, Zuckerberg starts Facebook with the help of his friends Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin. After three weeks, the site had more than 6,000 users. After opening to other colleges, the site grows to 10,000 users in one month and to over 30,000 in two months. In September 2004, Zuckerberg names Sean Parker president of the company. By then they have over 200,000 users. Parker goes on to play a critical role in Facebook’s expansion and acquiring financial backing.¹⁰

    • The same year, Facebook receives its first-ever investment (besides some initial investment by cofounders): $500,000 from Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and a private investor, and $40,000 from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and an angel investor.¹¹

    • In September 2004, Facebook introduces two of the most critical site improvements: the Wall and Groups. The Wall becomes an instant hit.

    • By end

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